My name is Tom Spink, and I’m a lecturer in the School of Computer Science at the University of St Andrews. Previously, I was a Senior Researcher in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh, where I worked on the McDoC project with Björn Franke, and the PAMELA project with Michael O’Boyle.

I lead the AVISI (Architecture Virtualisation and Simulation) research group, which (as per its name) is interested in how we can efficiently virtualise and simulate computer architectures.

My Public GPG key (for University business) is here, the fingerprint is:

F1F1 1ABD BEAB FBC1 4215  B715 CE1D 075B 67D5 648D

I am also a Fellow of the BCS (#995148506).

If you’re interested in studying for a PhD with me - get in touch!

Potential projects:

  • Make Unikernels Great: Bringing Unikernels to the masses, and exploiting them as a viable alternative to containers.
  • Dynamic Container and VM migration for Desktop as a Service: Seamless migration of containers and virtual machines to explore how we can use distributed virtualisation of desktop-style environments at scale.
  • Anything to do with Dynamic Binary Translation/JIT compilation.
  • Anything to do with compilers, runtime systems, operating systems!
  • Anything to do with hardware acceleration, using e.g. FPGAs.

My research interests include:

  • Virtualisation
  • Dynamic Binary Translation (and JIT compilation!)
  • Operating Systems (see InfOS)
  • Compilers
  • Runtime Systems
  • Hardware Acceleration

I’m also interested in:

  • Networking
  • The Internet-of-Things
  • Railway signalling and control systems
  • Security and privacy

My PhD thesis is entitled, “Efficient Cross-architecture Hardware Virtualisation” and proposes methods for improving the performance of the virtualisation of hardware that is significantly different to the host machine’s architecture.